Full Width Theme

[Coilworks]

Hello,

after understanding that theme-ing is quite time consuming and difficult for someone who has no idea of php and css, I decided to use and/or mod an existing theme. I liked "connections" quite a lot and although I can change all the images and colours (although trying to change the logo didn't work for an unknown reason) the main thing I want to change is the width  of the theme. It seems to be confined in a small 700px area whereas the classic theme takes up all the space a user has in their browser (1024x768 or 800x600) without showing bars.

Now, the theme creator mentions that one should change something in the configuration of coppermine to make bars vanish but it will still be confined in a small space. Changing the width inside css worked but the images (the background ones) couldn't show even though I resized them, and that was when viewing them in Frontpage (wrong thing to do maybe). After uploading the theme and loading it, no theme would appear as if the css and php files were "damaged".

I like this theme because of the well chosen fonts and button hovers but if I could make one myself without sweating, it would just have a logo, the sys menu on the left and cool addtitions (images) just like the connections theme.

So, "what am I to do" ? Can anyone help me?

[Gizmo]

Since you said you have no experience with CSS, this will not be trival to do. The theme was designed as a blog theme that was converted for use with Coppermine. Changing the width of the main content and adding a menubar on the left will be very time consuming so I recommend finding a new theme or learning css and html, php knowledge is not needed to edit the theme.

[EDIT] to add your own header image, you'll need to edit the top.jpg image in the images folder directly.

[Coilworks]

That was the answer I was afraid of but it's correct. Thanks 

[Gizmo]

Actually you can blame Internet Explorer for all the troubles. IE is such a non-conforming browser that you have to hack the css to get it to work as it should like in FF and when you "hack" a browser, you end up with problems when they finally fix the problem like they did with some things in IE7. I wish IE will go away. Also, I worked on a fluid design of this theme a while back and to be honest, it doesn't look as good as the narrow width theme but I'll try to finish it off and post it since a lot of people like this theme.

[Coilworks]

That would be great!

[Gizmo]

My deepest apologies. I mispoke when I said I had worked on a fluid design for Connections when in fact it was another theme that lends itself better to the conversion. Connections on the other hand does not for several reasons but one is because the background image for the page <div> is a fixed image so a complete redo of the layout would have to be done and images created. If I was going to go through all that work, I would do so with something of my own design. Sorry for my mistake.

[Coilworks]

It' fine  However, since  "if I could make one myself without sweating, it would just have a logo, the sys menu on the left and cool addtitions (images) just like the connections theme"  do you have any suggestions? Is there a theme that would require minimal changes and be easy to mod that could meet my requirements (full width included) ?

[Coilworks]

P.S. Just to get it out of the way, how does one remove the latest additions and most viewed categories? Thanks, and sorry for asking too much. 

[Gizmo]

how does one remove the latest additions and most viewed categories?

http://coppermine-gallery.net/demo/cpg14x/docs/index.htm#changing

[Joachim Müller]

In the future, please respect the "one question per thread" policy you agreed to when signing up. Read the docs before asking more questions.

[Coilworks]

Maybe you're right. I thought why open a new thread, since Gizmo seems eager to help.
I have read the docs. Not everything is in layman's terms.